Environmental Humanities Series: An Inquiry into the Metaphysics of Others

Event Description:

Join us for a public lecture by renowned French anthropologist Philippe Descola (Collège de France), with an introduction by Dale Jamieson. If, as Deleuze said, philosophy is the art of inventing concepts, then one may wonder why the philosophical resources of the largest part of humankind were, barring a few exceptions, generally ignored by professional Western philosophers. As a result, anthropologists have been led to play the part of ‘field philosophers’, bringing back in their notebooks other gnoseologies, other ontological systems, other political philosophies, other theories of the self, the interest of which has begun to be felt beyond anthropological circles, both as critical tools and as lived experiences of a radical alterity. However, the transposition of this conceptual alterity in a philosophical metalanguage remains extremely difficult for reasons that the lecture will explore.